Arizona Reporter - Movie Reviews - 02/12
AJAMI
Kino International
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten
Grade: B
Directed by: Scandar Copti, Yaron Shani
Written By: Scandar Copti, Yaron Shani
Cast: Shahir Kabaha, Ibrahim Frege, Fouad Habash, Youssef Sahwani, Ranin Karim, Eran Naim, Scandar Copti
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 11/19/09
Opens: February 3, 2010
The word on the street is that Israelis do some great things with technology, but movies are not their forte. Every once in a while, there’s an exception, in this case “Ajami,” a film whose appeal is nonetheless limited by its complexity. To get an idea of the film’s substance, think of Paul Haggis’s “Crash,” which interweaves a collection of characters during a two-day period in L.A., including a police detective with a druggie mother and thieving brother, a racist white veteran cop with an idealistic partner, an Iranian-immigrant father who buys a gun to protect his shop, a Hispanic locksmith and his young daughter who is afraid of bullets, and then some. If this type of complexity is your thing, by all means check out “Ajami.” Otherwise, you’d be better off with an artfully-done, simple but terrific movie like “Me and Orson Welles.”
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What troubles this film is probably not an error on the part of the two directors, Yaron Shani, who is an Israeli Jew, and Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab. They’ve edited the work in a haphazard way in order to show the action from different perspectives., and given the diversity of stories (there are five chapters in the movie), that makes only for more confusion than necessary. In addition, Boaz Yehonatan Yacov behind the hand-held camera keeps the action dark and murky, perhaps in his attempt at even more grittiness than is here on display.
Yet what saves the film is the quality of the performances, all by non-professional actors who took a ten-month workshop to develop the emotional truths of the film, after which they were sent out by Copti and Shani with the added function of improvising the scenes. According to the production notes, they were not even given scripts, and in one case which involved a shooting, they had no idea that this was planned. Many performers seem to have forgotten that cameras were on them. When the Arab actors living in the mixed Jewish-Arab-Christian neighborhood of Ajami in the Tel Aviv’s southern neighbor Jaffa battled it out with the performers playing Jewish cops, emotions were high. In that notable scene, Arab neighbors poured out of their houses to help their compatriot fight off the authorities. One has the impression that whatever photographer Yacov captured the first time around was a wrap; that rehearsals were verboten in order to keep the performers on their toes and spontaneous.
Money, romance, and ethnic hatred motivate the story. One Palestinian refugee (Ibrahim Frege), for example, is working illegally to raise the shekels (though for reason the monetary unit mentioned here was the dinar) to give his mother an operation to save her life, a procedure that would cost $75,000. Apparently Arabs are not part of the Israeli insurance system known as the Histadrut. Another fellow, Binj, a well-to-do Palestinian (co-director Scandar Copti) wants to marry his Jewish girlfriend and is reviled by his Arab friends who taunt him with scenarios in which he would raise his children as Jewish, making him almost a collaborator. In yet another “Mid-East Side Story,” the Christian daughter of a successful restaurateur wants to marry Omar (Shahir Kabaha), a Muslim, who pressures her to accept his proposal, one that is not forthcoming because her father is adamantly against a mixed marriage.
A gangster motif is prominent, in fact the film opens as two thugs on a bike determine to exact revenge on a rival group, shoot and kill a man changing the tire of his car, mistaken identity as it turns out. Amid all this commotion is the story of a Jewish cop eager to get news of his vanished soldier brother, enlisting Hasidim to put up posters of the missing person. In a small side role, a Jewish resident of Jaffa complains to four Arab neighbors that their sheep, which they keep illegally in their yard, is keeping him aware. You don’t get complaints like that here in New York, nor should this Israeli fellow know better.
“Ajami” may be loaded down with incidents but in the end, even for those who cannot iron things out with a second or third viewing, you get a picture of problems that the Jewish state faces that have nothing directly to do with terrorism or Iran or Hamas.
AJAMI (Kino International)
Unrated. 120 minutes. © 2009 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
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